Leonard Cohen, Canadian Singer-Songwriter Passes Away At 82

Leonard Cohen, a hugely influential singer and songwriter, whose work spanned five decades.

Cohen was the dark eminence among a small pantheon of extremely influential singer-songwriters to emerge in the Sixties and early Seventies. Only Bob Dylan exerted a more profound influence upon his generation, and perhaps only Paul Simon and fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell equaled him as a song poet. Cohen’s haunting bass voice, nylon-stringed guitar patterns, Greek-chorus backing vocals shaped evocative songs that dealt with love and hate, sex and spirituality, war and peace, ecstasy and depression. He was also the rare artist of his generation to enjoy artistic success into his Eighties, releasing his final album, You Want It Darker, earlier this year.

“I never had the sense that there was an end,” he said in 1992. “That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.” RollingStone

It’s not always readily apparent which songs are going to become standards. Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” didn’t seem to have much chance of becoming one when the Canadian singer-songwriter, who passed away Thursday at age 82, introduced it on his 1984 album Various Positions. Neither the song nor the album hit the Billboard charts that year or received a Grammy nomination.

But slowly but surely, the song has attained the status of a modern-day standard. It has reached Billboard‘s Hot 100 seven times (including a current version by the vocal group Pentatonix). It has been performed countless times on TV talent shows. Just two months ago, Tori Kelly sang the song during the “In Memoriam” segment at the Emmy Awards. Yahoo